


Capital

by CelestialArcadia



Category: Dragon Age - All Media Types
Genre: Antiva City (Dragon Age), Assassination, Canon-Typical Violence, Character Study, Gen, Minor Character Death, No Dialogue, POV Third Person Limited, POV Zevran Arainai, Pre-Dragon Age: Origins, Rain, Rated For Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-02
Updated: 2021-03-02
Packaged: 2021-03-15 09:34:22
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 665
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29806416
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CelestialArcadia/pseuds/CelestialArcadia
Summary: It often rains in Antiva City. Tonight is no exception.(A vignette about a job Zevran takes long before he finds himself intertwined with the Blight.)
Comments: 1
Kudos: 2





	Capital

**Author's Note:**

> Hello! This is the fic I wrote for the Wanderlust Dragon Age calendar (or, more specifically, the zine that went with it). It was an honor to be presented with so many great artists and writers. (Plus, I adore Zevran, and I like writing him.)

Tonight, as with many nights, it rains in Antiva City. This, in itself, is not an especially notable fact. The sky is blue; the Divine is Andrastean; Antiva City is wet.

Tonight, as with many nights, Zevran will take the life of someone. This, too, is not notable; he has killed many people, and will kill many more. That is the life of an assassin, and he is hardly the only Crow in the area.

His current target is a candidate for the throne of Antiva. Or, well, he could be, if he decided to run for election. He hasn’t, as far as anyone knows, but that hasn’t stopped people from being assassinated before, and Zevran cares little for the details of who he is told to kill.

But, though Zevran did not receive much information about _why_ people wanted this man dead, he can make a few educated guesses. The man is an ideologue. Zevran can tell by how few guards there are, by how the windows are unlocked. This man is someone who prides himself on how accessible he is; how easy it is for people to get into contact with him.

He won’t live long enough to regret that decision.

It isn’t long before Zevran arrives at the man’s home, and he’s almost disappointed by how smoothly things go. He easily avoids the guards he finds (all two of them). When he sees the man he is due to kill sitting calmly at his desk, reading some book or another, he considers making a mistake on purpose. It isn’t worth it, though, he knows this; as fun as the chase can be, he of all people knows that the goal is what is most important. An easy job is better than one where there is a risk of death or failure (the same thing, really).

So Zevran silently approaches the mark, and slits the man’s throat. A clean kill, more or less—the blood largely confines itself to staining the corpse and the desk rather than Zevran’s clothes. (Cleaning blood out of clothes is, he finds, the second-most unpleasant part of being an assassin. The first is moving bodies around, all lumpy and stiff—he’s glad to be able to simply leave the bodies where they lie here.)

Then he throws a dagger at a curtain behind him. There’s a moan as it pierces the body of the person hiding behind it.

When Zevran goes to retrieve his weapon, he notices that the man who had been hiding behind the curtain was identical to the man who had been reading. He wonders, for just a brief moment, which of them was the man he was contacted to kill. Did one of them sacrifice his twin? Have these men been pretending to be a single person the whole time?

Zevran doesn’t know, and he doesn’t much care. The man is dead, whether he was one man or two. Now his duty is to leave, and to report back to his betters.

He exits the estate through a different route than the one he entered by. He winds through the labyrinthine streets of a city built, in part, to support the needs of its assassins. The air smells of saltwater and leather. Combined with the rain, now pouring down even harder than it had been when he set off, and it ought to be unpleasant. It _is_ unpleasant, really, in a pure physical sense, wet and salty and grimy, but—

There’s a pride, too, in the knowledge of a job well done. A lesser assassin would have been caught off guard by the doppelgänger lying in wait, may have been injured or even killed by the mark. Zevran is not a lesser assassin; he has trained essentially his whole life to kill and kill well.

Soon, he will reach shelter. (Not quite a home.) He can dry off, eat dinner, relax awhile. His life is…well, he has nothing to complain about, he thinks.


End file.
